Market Risk: Like with any investment, Bitcoin values can fluctuate. Indeed, the value of the currency has seen wild swings in price over its short existence. Subject to high volume buying and selling on exchanges, it has a high sensitivity to “news." According to the CFPB, the price of bitcoins fell by 61% in a single day in 2013, while the one-day price drop in 2014 has been as big as 80%.

That low point in unique addresses is a point where Bitcoin was hovering around $6,900 USD back around April 11, 2018. Using the seven-day average of the number of unique addresses (which smoothes out low points caused by low volume on the weekends), you can see that growth has returned since April to this underlying fundamental. The price today is lower, but the number of users appears to be growing again, and this time the network can support more transactions than before due to the rise of Segwit Adoption. If I had to guess I would say Bitcoin could now handle 50% to 100% more transactions per second than when we had the last peak in December/January.

According to the European Central Bank, the decentralization of money offered by bitcoin has its theoretical roots in the Austrian school of economics, especially with Friedrich von Hayek in his book Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined,[120] in which he advocates a complete free market in the production, distribution and management of money to end the monopoly of central banks.[121]:22 On 3 March 2014, Flexcoin announced it was closing its doors because of a hack attack that took place the day before.[211][212][213] In a statement that once occupied their homepage, they announced on 3 March 2014 that "As Flexcoin does not have the resources, assets, or otherwise to come back from this loss [the hack], we are closing our doors immediately."[214] Users can no longer log into the site.

In 2014, researchers at the University of Kentucky found "robust evidence that computer programming enthusiasts and illegal activity drive interest in bitcoin, and find limited or no support for political and investment motives".[127] Australian researchers have estimated that 25% of all bitcoin users and 44% of all bitcoin transactions are associated with illegal activity as of April 2017. There were an estimated 24 million bitcoin users primarily using bitcoin for illegal activity. They held $8 billion worth of bitcoin, and made 36 million transactions valued at $72 billion.[227][228] A group of researches analyzed bitcoin transactions in 2016 and came to a conclusion that "some recent concerns regarding the use of bitcoin for illegal transactions at the present time might be overstated".[229]

More recently, at a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill, global economist and New York University professor Nouriel Roubini said, "Crypto is the mother or father of all scams and bubbles." He called out "swindlers" who tapped into investors' fear of missing out and took them for a ride with "crappy assets that went into a bust and crash — in a matter of months — like you have not seen in any history of financial bubbles."